Amazon gives non-Prime members free shipping at $35 or more of eligible items. Instead of simply letting users get the product with free shipping, they’ve added a discount that prices it exactly one cent below the $35 limit, while only subsidizing the price with $3.38, which is about half of what they’ll then charge you for shipping.
Saved me $4, I’m fine with it.
We need another amazon to beat the existing amazon up, retail sales are just bloated and dead.
OR, how about we start getting mom and pop shops to do local ecommerse with delivery.
How have you ‘saved’ money that you spent, exactly?
I need a $40 screwdriver and 12v battery
They reduce the price of the screwdriver kit $4 to make it not free shipping on it’s own
I buy them both for $40.
I would have to buy them anyway, I spent $40 instead of $45 and still got “free shipping”
If they bundled the item with a pack of batteries in a retail store and sold it for 39.99, would you still consider it cheaper?
Would you consider $39.99 cheaper than $45?
not the person you responded to but, would depend if that’s the only thing I’m getting, gas costs money, I defo wouldn’t concider that small of a discount saving money since it will cost me about 6 or 7$ in gas getting there and back
It’s still cheaper than it would have been without Amazon’s discount
Cheaper on Amazon, or anywhere else?
Both
How? You cannot buy this “cheaper” version without spending more money. It’s 39.99 with free shipping other places. It’s $39.99 on Amazon because you have to pay for shipping. You’re not saving money, you’re just getting more stuff from Amazon.
Unless you buy useless stuff just to avoid shipping, it’s still money spent toward something you would have bought later (possibly for a higher price, on retail). It counts on future savings.
If you spend the same amount of money to get more things that you were going to buy, you’ve saved money.
If I need bread and cheese and one store sells bread for $10 and cheese for $5, and another sells $10 bread half off if I buy $5 cheese with it, I save money going to the second store, even if I only came into the store looking for bread.
Amazon is using dirty tricks to ensure you buy from them even if it’s at a lower margin. A smaller profit is better than no sale. It also gets consumers more accustomed to just buying stuff on Amazon, and increases the sales producers see through the Amazon platform. Some producers entirely offload their commerce to Amazon since enough of their sales come from there it makes running their own less viable.
Supposed you were going to buy batteries elsewhere anyway. So you saved money by doing it in one go there.
I dont think you understand how “Amazon” exists as we know it.
Amazon, the store. the store that sells stuff at “unbeatable” prices and has convenient fast shipping options. exists because Amazon, the corporation, makes most of its money through platforms that are NOT the store.
for example the AWS division, which handles web hosting, Makes money hand over fist compared to the store. so they can afford to sell stuff at either a loss, or breaking even. (and they’re still somehow making money off the ordeal. dont ask me where)
Its hard to make a competitor to Amazon because you’d need a surrogate company constantly feeding it money to stay afloat. Amazon the store, is a facade of a larger corporation
I’m not sure that’s entirely true.
Most of their money comes from retail, either the site, subscriptions, or the seller services they provide. AWS, while massive, isn’t what’s keeping them afloat.
You’re entirely correct though that competition with Amazon is difficult because of those additional sources of revenue. Having additional stable sources of income gives them the ability to accept lower margins in retail with less risk.
The way they make money selling things with no profit or at a loss is to ensure that someone else is always paying the difference. “Free shipping” with a paid subscription means that rather than providing shipping for a loss, they just need to do it for less than the subscription. Turns out “guy with a van” can deliver a lot of packages for quite cheap. So many that he’ll be out delivering from 3am to 9pm, and for $5 they’ll drop your package off first and call it overnight.
In some cases they can get the seller to pay for shipping as a promotional incentive, since Amazons conditioned people to look for free shipping as a precondition to considering a product.
Only give away for free what you got someone else to pay for.
Revenue is not profit.
Yes, but revenue pays for things like salaries, advertising, etc.
It helps with cash flow sure, but if it’s not profit you’re going into debt to pay that.
What do you think profit is? It seems like you’re conflicting profit with income.
Profit is revenue - cost of goods.
If you make a widget and it costs you $100 to make, and you sell it for $110, you have $10 profit. Then you have all the other expenses that it takes to run a business, lets say that’s $200.
Your revenue is $110
You profit is $10
Additional Expenses: $200
You NET profit (AKA Net Income) is $-90
I mean, non profits exist. Of course it’s not the case for Amazon, but you don’t need to profit in order to exist as a company, and people still get to make money.
All companies have to earn a profit, not just to pay for the expense of the goods plus all of the overhead, but also to be able to reinvest and grow. There’s a difference between earning a livable wage while the company as a whole remains poor and earning barely enough to live on while the investors pull in massive gains year over year.
A company taking excess revenue and reinvesting it isn’t profit.
There may be phrases with the word profit in them that include that value, but the general accepted definition is profit is the money that gets distributed to the stakeholders after expenses are covered. This is things like dividends for publicly traded companies, or for private companies, it’s just straight up paying out the cash to stakeholders.
Non profit doesn’t mean no profit.
Non profits make enough profit to pay their employees, rent, and any other business needs, or they get money from other sources. They still need and make money to operate.
For a company to succeed, there must be profit, or have an outside source of funding.
You cannot pay rent, employees or other business expenses with revenue and no profit without going into debt.
Non profit means no profit. Salaries, rent, etc are not paid from profit.
That is fundamentally what profit is, revenue less expenses. By definition, profit is money that does not have anywhere to go in a business, and so gets distributed to stake holders of the company.
Heh, “revenue is not profit”.
Non-profits are specifically not allowed to have revenue in excess of expenses. If they take in too much money, the excess has to be put back in for operational expenses in the future, an endowment or something like that.
Walmart and Target already do it. Just get rid of the public facing store part and send it to me as cheap as retail.
There are companies in china already doing this.
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